Exhibit celebrates José Posada’s 150th
birthday

BY
JOHN SANFORD

Long before Diego Rivera began painting murals on the walls of
public buildings, a medium he viewed as less elitist than the
gallery canvas, the popular illustrations of José Guadalupe
Posada were speaking directly to the working poor.

To
mark Posada's 150th birthday, an exhibition of his work and that of
the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Workshop for Popular Graphic
Arts), which took its creative inspiration largely from Posada, is
on view in the Peterson Gallery of Green Library through March 15.
Curated by D. Vanessa Kam and Adán Griego of Stanford
University Libraries, the exhibition is free and open to the
public.

For
close to five years, Stanford University Libraries has been
developing a research collection on Posada and the Taller de
Gráfica Popular. It has amassed close to 1,400 prints and
several important monographs. The exhibit features a large sampling
of this material, including prints, printing blocks, broadsheets,
posters, photographs and rare illustrated books.

Born in 1852 in the Mexican state of Aguascalientes, Posada
lived most of his life in pre-Revolutionary Mexico. When he was 16,
he became an apprentice at a lithography shop, where he produced
cartoons about local politics. The sharp-witted satire and vitriol
exhibited in these prints drew the ire of some powerful men in the
region, forcing Posada and his boss, José Trinidad Pedroza,
to pack up and leave.

In
1872, they set up shop in the city of Léon, in the state of
Guanajuato, where Posada produced illustrations for magazines,
books and commercial items. He also taught lithography at a local
secondary school and started a family. But the defining moment of
his career came in 1888, when he relocated to Mexico City. There
Posada began illustrating popular broadsheets -- so-called hojas
volantes, or "flying leaves" -- published by the businessman
Antonio Vanegas Arroyo.

In
his autobiography, Rivera credits Posada as one of his principal
influences. While the praise is undoubtedly sincere, the two men
held markedly different ambitions. Posada considered himself an
expert technician and draftsman -- blue collar to the bone -- not a
member of the fine-arts coterie. His audience was the urban and
rural poor.

Yet
both artists shared a strong populist streak. And though Posada's
calaveras depicted the idiosyncrasies of both rich and poor,
the butt of his jokes were more often white-collar professionals,
government officials and the middle and upper classes.

Sensationalism

Posada may be best known for his drawings of calaveras,
skeletal caricatures associated primarily with Día de los
Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations. (They are ubiquitous
all year round in his work.) Yet more than half of the thousands of
drawings he produced for Vanegas Arroyo's broadsheets deal with
crime, particularly bloody and macabre violence committed in
moments of passion, as well as natural disasters and freaks of
nature.

This broadsheet "news" was often laced with a kind of wry,
dark humor. One unctuously warns of the dangers of the Francophile
fad of bicycle riding that was then sweeping Mexico's Europeanized
upper classes. The print, depicting a man riding a bicycle while
fearful pedestrians scramble to get out of the way, recalls
Stanford's White Plaza at lunchtime.

Comic relief, in any form, is almost completely lacking in the
work of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP). Nevertheless,
the TGP understood the democratic vigor of the print form and
considered Posada one of its social, political and spiritual
mentors.

Founded in 1937 by members of a dissolved artists' collective
called the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios
(League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists), the TGP was bound
together by an allegiance to the agrarian and social reform goals
of the Mexican Revolution. Through the printmaking medium, it aimed
its rallying cry of social and political justice at the poor
working classes. Many of the prints were political propaganda in
its purest form. One poster, titled "Help to Prevent This Crime,"
depicts Ethel and Julius Rosenberg strapped to electric chairs
while a devilishly clawed hand (wearing a cuff link with a dollar
sign) is prevented from pulling a lever by what is presumably the
symbolic hand of working-class outrage.

TGP
founder Leopoldo Méndez's homage to Posada, who was as
likely to draw a gaggle of partying skeletons as dispossessed and
impoverished members of the working class, is too saturated with
earnestness to truly reflect the man. This linoleum-cut image shows
Posada, paunchy and ponderous, sitting at a desk and watching
through a window as government troops attack unarmed
civilians.

Yet
both Posada and the TGP shared a desire for social justice. The
lament of a cartoonish lawyer by Posada may best capture the spirit
of this common cause: "If I had only been an honorable artisan,
earning my living with the sweat of my brow!"